The advantage of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents is that they can be accessed via a range of devices and read audible by screen readers.
You can help to ensure that such documents maintain their sense by following many of the principles outlined in other pages on this website, such as those governing structuring and writing pages.
Although PDFs can be built in Adobe Acrobat, we usually create a document in another application and then convert it to a PDF. The guiding principle to follow is that it is by making this parent document accessible you will help ensure your PDF is accessible.
There is a great and in-depth guide on how to create accessible documents on the Carleton Accessibility website.
In general remember that to make your documents accessible you must:
- structure your information properly using hierarchical organization of the information, under appropriate headings and sub-headings
- use tables sparingly and only when they are properly created with table column headings
- make sure all images possess alt text and are in-line rather than “floating”
- ensure text and background colours possess a large contrast in their color. Eg, black text on a white background